Todd Dills

Operators pitch in to foil suicide attempt, take two

It was truckers to the rescue again Monday in Minneapolis as a suicidal man stood poised to jump, hanging onto nothing more than the outside of a chain-link fence at the edge of a 25-foot-high bridge over I-94. A trooper on the scene, Carl Hoffman, took a page from the Tuscaloosa, Ala., police’s handbook and asked the operators of several tractor-dry van rigs that had been stuck in the traffic that backed up around the scene if they would be willing to pull their rigs in line under the bridge to potentially break the man’s long fall should he jump.

That’s right — this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve reported on the Channel 19 blog about such an incident, the last being in 2009 when something very similar happened on McFarland Boulevard in Overdrive‘s hometown headquarters of Tuscaloosa (pictured, Tuscaloosa News photo). Read more about that here.

As Trooper Hoffman explains in a video interview on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s website, once they were in place, the man was fortunately pulled back onto the bridge by local firefighters and police.

Todd Dills

Todd Dills is Senior Editor of Overdrive magazine and writes from Nashville, Tenn. He frequently covers business, regulatory and lifestyle topics for the magazine and at OverdriveOnline.com. His work on the “CSA’s Data Trail” series in Overdrive about the federal CSA program was awarded the highest honor in trade journalism – the “Grand Neal” – by American Business Media at the 2014 Jesse H. Neal Awards. Dills’ Channel 19 blog covers a grab bag of on-highway hearsay, owner-operator news and driver views from the roadways the nation over. His work in trucking journalism builds on a background of news feature, fiction and other creative writing and editing. Find him here at the Channel 19 blog and via his Twitter feed, or send tips to tdills@randallreilly.com or via phone at 205-907-2481.